"Frankenstein" -- Parable or Spectacle?

David Seed

Criticism, 24:4 (Fall 1982). 327-40

{327} "You may deduce an apt moral from my tale." With these
words Frankenstein prefaces his narration to Walton in the
middle of the Arctic ice.1 It is a statement which suggests
one way of reading Mary Shelley's novel, namely to treat it as a
cautionary tale which asserts the prime importance of domestic ties. Several comments
are subsequently made in the narrative which bring out these
values, the most famous reads as follows:

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example,
how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much
happier that man is who believes his native town to be the
world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature
will allow. (p. 53)

Frankenstein is insisting that moderation, prudence and
generally limited objectives are preferable to the sort of
excessive ambitions he sees -- not without pride -- in himself.
In the novel this opposition is expressed spatially in the
contrast between the tightly-knit little Swiss towns on the one hand and
the open (but dead) Arctic
wastes on the other. The interesting thing about
Frankenstein's admonition is that, at the same time as he
asserts what we might call the "domestic moral" he is also
suggesting an alternative way to view his narrative. He
describes himself as a Faustian over-reacher, trying
to go beyond the bounds of human nature in his thirst for
knowledge. And this is a view which Walton enthusiastically
supports; after Frankenstein's narrative he exclaims "What a
glorious creature must he have been in the days of his
prosperity when he is thus noble and godlike in ruin!" (p. 210). This is one of the
many allusions to Milton in
the novel, specifically of course to the fallen archangel Satan, and is obviously an
allusion which might bolster Frankenstein's stature. In his last
speech he himself sneers at what he calls "common projectors"
and shows an aristocratic sense of his own superiority. In short
he sees {328} himself as belonging to an elite which Mary
Shelley describes in one of her essays, an elite of "those
superior minds which are themselves the law, and whose innate
impulses are the fiats, of intellectual creation."2 There are no
qualifications here; the ambitious energies of the mind are
their own justification. In a sense it is the opposite side of
the coin from the insistence on domestic piety, and each
emphasis, each viewpoint, seems to cope with significant aspects
of the novel. The assertion of domestic values draws our
attention to the prominence of the family and the pathos and
horror of the series of deaths; the view of Frankenstein as a
superior being draws our attention to the special and extreme
nature of his destiny. The first approach would treat the
narrative as a cautionary tale or parable, the second as a
spectacle. In fact neither of these approaches does justice to
the whole novel which subverts the moral status of the family and which
consistently denies Frankenstein any heroic standing. The novel
works characteristically by negatives, inversions and reversals;
and it consistently focuses on the destructive energies
unleashed by Frankenstein's desires.

We can begin by considering the nature of his family. The father
is a magistrate and a paragon of virtue who marries and adopts a
daughter out of pure benevolence. As Frankenstein himself says,
"no human being could have passed a happier childhood than
myself" (p. 37). There is no
poverty; the parents are not tyrants; there are no internal
tensions at all. When she revised the novel for the 1831 edition
(the standard text) Mary Shelley increased the details of the
family's idyllic life, as if to rule out any possible reason for
Frankenstein's dissatisfaction with it. If this family is
unable to limit his ambitions, the novel implies, what family
can? Not only that. Frankenstein describes his early life as if
to explain how his interest in science grew, but the origins of
this interest remain shrouded in mystery:

. . . when I would account to myself for the birth of that passion,
which afterwards ruled my destiny, I find it arose, like a
mountain river, from ignoble and almost forgotten sources; but,
swelling as it proceeded, it became the torrent which, in its
course, has swept away all my hopes and joys. (p. 38)

This is one of the most important statements in the novel
because it indicates that Frankenstein sees his own guiding
impulse as somehow autonomous, as independent as a natural
process. The curiosity which {329} the metaphor refers to is the
premise of his character and, although we can observe this
curiosity taking on different forms, there is never a suggestion
that Frankenstein can bring it under control. The only point
where he makes a decision is whether or not to make the Monster
a mate. Not even the development of his interest in science
seems methodical. He happens to find a book by Cornelius Agrippa; he happens
to see a tree struck by lightning; and even though he meets an
expert on galvanism he
wilfully persists in reading the alchemists. In other words
sheer chance and perversity figure prominently in the way
Frankenstein pursues his studies, which reinforces the constant
implication that he is too wrapped up in what he is doing
to be conscious of why he is doing it.

Once he forms his project to create a living being the ironies
multiply rapidly. Like Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll he rationalizes
his enterprise in terms of philanthropy towards mankind although
his real aspiration is to godlike privilege; he sees himself
surrounded by docile admiring creatures. And although he is
trying to create life the only way he can do so is by grubbing
furtively around graveyards. In short the novel
denies any grandeur either to Frankenstein's ambition or to his
enterprise. It is a minor character, Professor Waldman at Ingolstadt University, who
says of modern scientists,

. . . they penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she
works in her hiding places. . . . they can command the
thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the
invisible world with its own shadows. (pp. 47-48)

This is the most forceful articulation of Frankenstein's dream
of power in the novel. It captures his curiosity, but the fact
that he himself does not say these words marks an important
difference from say Goethe's
Faust (the Shelleys were familiar with Part One).3 At the
beginning of that play Faust enacts his ambition through the
figures of liberation which pack his first speech. He chafes at
being pent up in his Gothic chamber and yearns to burst out on
the wings of his studies in alchemy:

{330} It is the physical force of Faust's verbal gestures which
convinces us of the energy in his ambition as well as its scope,
and that in turn builds up his grandeur as a character. By
contrast Frankenstein is denied any similar rhetoric and his own
retrospective colouring of his narrative suggests doom and
failure even before his experiments begin. When they do begin he
labours obscurely in a cell and not in the laboratories full of
bubbling flasks which constantly appear in film versions of the
novel. Even the Monster turns out to be a grotesque assembly of
bits and pieces cobbled together.

It is obvious that Frankenstein is in some sense a Faustian
over-reacher and yet the novel sets up too many ironies for us
to make this statement without a lot of qualification.
Frankenstein is a particularly unimpressive Faust and the
subtitle of the novel, The Modern Prometheus, again
undercuts the mythic parallel. Prometheus brings fire,
whereas Frankenstein creates not a higher being but a mutant.5 The theme of
fire brings together the Prometheus myth and the contemporary
experiments in galvanism which Mary Shelley mentions in her 1831 preface, and reinforces
one of the novel's main ironies: that the creative impulse can
easily reverse into its opposite, destruction. The first
important appearance in the novel of fire comes when
Frankenstein witnesses an electric storm in the Jura mountains:

I remained, while the storm lasted, watching its progress with
curiosity and delight. As I stood at the door, on a sudden I
beheld a stream of fire issue from an old and beautiful oak
which stood about twenty yards from our house; and so soon as
the dazzling light vanished the oak had disappeared, and nothing
remained but a blasted stump. (p. 41)

It is strange to say the least that the impulse to creation
should begin from a spectacle of destruction and it is the sheer
power of the lightning which dazzles Frankenstein. But
power is an ambiguous force which rebounds on this would-be
creator to destroy him. So when he later realizes the full
extent of the Monster's benevolence it is quite appropriate for
him to internalize the very image which inspired him, "I am a
blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul" (p. 160). Whereas {331}
Frankenstein's interest in fire is metaphysical, the Monster
sees it first as a social means when he collects wood for the De
Laceys.6 Then
when that hope is dashed he burns down their cottage in a ritual
of despair. The last time we see the Monster in the novel he is
looking forward to his own funeral pyre. Although fire becomes
associated symbolically with life itself we never lose our
awareness of its destructive potential. Since Frankenstein
begins this imagistic theme it is appropriately symmetrical for
the Monster to conclude it and also to state the central paradox
of the novel, "I, too, can create desolation" (p. 143).

The novel clearly deals with a creative urge gone horrifically
wrong. In a short story called "The Mortal Immortal" (1834) Mary Shelley
returned to this same theme, but this time in a comic way. The
hero of the story, one Winzy, is an assistant to Cornelius Agrippa and also,
for his pains, in love with Bertha, one of the beauties of his
village. Bertha, however, will not have any truck with a mere
alchemist's assistant and in his frustration Winzy drinks his
master's elixir thinking it is a love potion. He gets Bertha but
to her fury never ages so that people think she is his mother
and finally drive them out of society. Once again a discovery --
the elixir of life -- which might be a boon to mankind reverses
into a liability. Despite her references to Erasmus Darwin in her preface
Mary Shelley was basically skeptical about the possibility of
creating life. As she wrote in a letter of 1823, "I fear that no
Frankenstein can so arrange the gases as to be able to make any
combination of them produce thought or even life."7 Neither the
secure comic detachment of the short story nor the calm
skepticism of the letter comes out in the novel which dramatizes
a fearful fascination with the possibility of creation and an
underlying anxiety about the rightful bounds of science.

The twin emphases in the novel are on science and on the family; creation is articulated
partly in terms of birth and consequences in terms of parental
responsibility. At the center of the narrative stands
Frankenstein of course and every other important character turns
out to be related to him in some way.8 He describes Elizabeth as "my {332}
more than sister"; Walton becomes his "brother"; the Monster,
Frankenstein's brainchild, "adopts" the De Lacey family, and so
on. These connections suggest that the family is being put
forward as a model of human relationships; but even more than
that, the narrative invites contrast between these characters
and Frankenstein, as if they embody alternative aspects of one
self. In the case of Clerval the contrast is clear: he shares
Frankenstein's moral fervour but is planning to channel it in
more humanitarian directions. Frankenstein makes the contrast
between them explicit when he later describes Clerval as "the
image of my former self" (p.
158). Therefore, since he is ultimately responsible for all
their deaths we could see Frankenstein progressively killing off
more and more humanizing aspects of his self. The logical end
result of this sequence is that he should destroy himself, which
he does, although the novel characteristically denies him either
the conscious decision or suicide or any dramatic death. He
simply dies from premature exhaustion.

It is clear that the connection between the Monster and
Frankenstein is the central relation of the whole novel and
before we examine it, we need to note the way in which the novel
modifies the Gothic in
reducing the fantastic and supernatural. The fact that "the
event on which the interest of the story depends is exempt from
the disadvantages of a mere tale of spectres or enchantment" (p. 12) was an obvious source
of pride to Percy Shelley when he wrote the 1818 preface; and in
her essay "On Ghosts" Mary Shelley went out of her way to mock
conventional atmospherics:

. . . ghosts that lift the curtains at the foot of your bed as the
clock chimes one; who rise all pale and ghastly from the
church-yard and haunt their ancient abodes . . . whose
cold unearthly touch makes the hair stand stark upon the head;
the true old-fashioned, foretelling, flitting, gliding ghost, --
who has seen such a one?

Obviously the expected answer is "nobody"; but interestingly she
does not close the door completely on the supernatural. She adds
tentatively "there is something beyond us of which we are
ignorant", and this sense of "something beyond" comes out in the
novel as an evil whose sources are shrouded in mystery and in
the repeated suggestion that the main processes at work are
divorced from human management.9 It might be objected that Mary
Shelley clung to the {333} Gothic vocabulary in calling the
Monster a "spectre," "devil," "fiend," "ogre" or even
"vampire," but the sheer variety of terms stops the Monster from
fitting into any one category.

There is broad agreement among the critics who have written
about the novel that the Monster and Frankenstein are two parts of one entity.
Harold Bloom, for instance, compares them to doublings in the
poetry of Blake or Shelley and calls them "the
solipsistic and generous halves of the one self."10 This needs
modification, however, because the Monster is a far cry from an
emanation or an epipsyche, and a comparison with Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde at least reveals the complexity of
Frankenstein. In Stevenson's novel Dr. Jekyll, like
Frankenstein is trying to go against the bounds of human
nature. Frankenstein is appalled by death, Dr. Jekyll by the
duality of human nature, and he dreams of separating the
halves:

If each, I told myself, could be housed in separate, identities,
life would be relieved of all that was unbearable; the unjust
might go his way, delivered from the aspirations and remorse of
his more upright twin; and the just could walk steadfastly and
securely on his upward path . . .11

Dr. Jekyll tries to split his libido from his super-ego in an
effort to avoid the troublesome burden of conscience, and of
course the experiment goes wrong because he loses control of his
transformations. This is the source of horror. We have no doubts
at all about the distinction between Jekyll and Hyde, only about
when the one will become the other.

By contrast the relation of the Monster to Frankenstein is
constantly shifting and this raises an enormous critical problem
because any discussion will run the risk of falsely stabilizing
the connection between the two. Thus Frankenstein dreams of
creating a subject, in other words he foresees a relation of
power. The birth-analogy implied in the sequence of labour,
agonized horror when the Monster as it were "appears" and
physical collapse, suggests another relation which the Monster
recognizes -- that of parent to child. Once the series of deaths
begins Frankenstein then sees the Monster as some kind of evil
spirit, or "daemon," which the Oxford English Dictionary
de- {334} fines as "an attendant, ministering or in-dwelling
spirit."12
The relation is further complicated by the parallels between the
Monster and Frankenstein. Both are moved, for instance, by
pictures of Frankenstein's mother; the one repeats the words of
the other; and each draws on Milton for Christian analogies
with their predicament. The Monster sees himself as Adam to Frankenstein's God, but then decides on
reflection that he's more like Satan. Even that analogy
won't quite work, as he realizes, because he is in a worse
plight than Satan in not having any companions. Frankenstein for
his part compares himself both to Satan and to Adam experiencing
the Fall. Obviously they cannot both be right. The point here
is not so much that the analogies don't really fit, but that
both the Monster and Frankenstein should try to find similar
analogies. Frankenstein's original dream put no burden of
responsibility on himself and as soon as the Monster comes alive
his instinctive reaction is to run away. In other words he wants
to separate himself from the Monster. The intricate network of
parallels between them rhetorically undermines this attempt at
separation and underpins the Monster's efforts to keep them both
together. One of the main progressions of the novel is to force
the Monster and Frankenstein closer together towards a final
confrontation which never materializes.

The parallels between the Monster and Frankenstein have a
further effect which can be seen in the central episode of the
novel -- their meeting on the glacier which frames the
Monster's narrative. Frankenstein exclaims "Devil
. . . do you dare approach me? and do not you fear
the fierce vengeance of my arm wreaked on your miserable head?"
The Monster's reaction is comically calm; he says merely, "I
expected this reception" (p.
99). His manner comes as a shock because he speaks in a
calmly rational way; he speaks, in other words, as we might
expect Frankenstein to. Whereas Frankenstein's violent language
would be more appropriate to the Monster. After his narrative
the position reverses briefly when Frankenstein speaks calmly
and the Monster flies into a passion. The reversals in
speech-style here relate to shifts in argument over the
Monster's claim on Frankenstein. The whole episode in fact
parallels Adam's request for a mate from God in Book 8 of
Paradise Lost.13 The Monster uses Adam's argument
{335} that without a mate he will be cut off from the "chain of
existence," but the mythical parallel as usual doesn't quite fit
because the Monster threatens Frankenstein as well as making a
claim on him and this is typical of their relationship.
Submission will reverse into threat; a feeling of power into
helpless horror; and so on. The cumulative effect of these
reversals is to complicate the reader's reaction to Frankenstein
and the Monster. We might expect Frankenstein to join the
gallery of Gothic heroes with striking names -- Montoni,
Zastrozzi, Melmoth -- but in fact he comes across as a very
unimpressive figure in the narrative. If anything Mary Shelley
stresses his physical vulnerability (he collapses twice), and
does not highlight him in relief against the background of
social normality. Ironically he is as much a victim as the other
members of his family being alienated into a kind of living
death by his original act. His father thinks he has become
deranged but he insists,

"I am not mad . . . the sun and the heavens, who have
viewed my operations, can bear witness of my truth. I am the
assassin of those innocent victims; they died by my
machinations." (p. 86)

Here the immediate context smothers the force of Frankenstein's
words; the more he says, the more convinced his father becomes
that he is mad. And Frankenstein's general helplessness further
detracts from the energy of his self-accusation. So should we
look to the Monster to fulfill the stereotype Gothic hero who is
usually tall and dark with flashing eyes? Again even in terms of
physical stature the answer is not very satisfactory. The
Monster is tall but his eyes are dull and yellowish, and the
fact that he speaks in such a rational way temporarily blocks
over our consciousness that he is a Monster. As the Monster and
Frankenstein constantly shift roles it becomes increasingly
difficult to apply terms like "hero" or "villain" to them and
one of the fascinating and demanding aspects of the novel is
that it invites speculation about the nature of its two
protagonists. Their argument and counter-argument over the moral
crux as to whether Frankenstein should create a mate is only one
example of a constant alternation in perspective which lasts
right up to the Monster's final soliloquy over Frankenstein's
corpse.

Ironically the creature proves to have more awareness than its
maker. The Monster's story, for instance, makes out a remarkably
cogent case against society. He is originally benevolent and
constantly {336} subjected to brutality, cruelty and
ingratitude; in short it emerges as the innocent victim of man's
"prejudice" -- according to the Monster, that is. The problem
here is that the Monster is so articulate on his own behalf and
he certainly convinced Percy
Shelley who, under the effect of his rhetoric, jumped to the
conclusion that the
novel's moral is "treat a person ill and he will become
wicked."14
The trouble is that the story is told by a monster and
that we hear his story after his first murder which inevitably
predisposes us against him. The fact that the Monster becomes
narrator temporarily minimizes our sense of his appearance, in
other words minimizes our sense of him as a monster until
through a series of self-recognitions he becomes aware of the
pathos in his situation. His recurring question "What was I?"
[2.5.7, 2.7.2] mimicks Frankenstein's
own metaphysical searches, just as the premise of his existence
(his ugliness) resembles and is the consequence of
Frankenstein's curiosity. So when Frankenstein says "his soul is
as hellish as his form" (p.
209) what he should say is "his form is as hellish as
my curiosity."

Frankenstein's original dream was of control but the steady
increase in passive verbs imply that he is being caught up in a
current of events where the Monster takes the dominant role. It
is the Monster who says "You are my creator, but I am your
master" [3.3.3] As the
various members of the Frankenstein family die the action
settles down into a monodrama where creator and creature pursue
each other. Even in the energy to press on. One of the great
achievements of the novel is that it creates such a
claustrophobic atmosphere despite the variety of locations and
the setting becomes progressively more bleak as the Monster's
revenge takes its toll. The conflict between the Monster and
Frankenstein first crystallizes when they meet on the glacier,
which Mary Shelley describes as "the most desolate place in the
world."15
Whereas fire connotes ambivalent energy which might be
life-giving or destructive, ice connotes death and it is
appropriate that the novel should shift to the Arctic wastes
where we expect the final confrontation to take place. One
reason why it doesn't materialize is that the action is internal
as well as external. Frankenstein is pursued as much by the idea
that the Monster will kill his family as by the Monster {337}
himself; after Clerval's death he has a recurring nightmare of
the Monster trying to throttle him, and during the whole pursuit
articulates his suffering through private images of torture --
as if water was dripping on his head, for instance. If we accept
the close connection between monster and maker, it is quite
appropriate for the Monster to plan his own suicide[:] after the
death of Frankenstein he cannot have any kind of separate
existence.

Although there are a number of allusions to "The Ancient Mariner" in
Frankenstein a much more useful text for comparison would
be William Godwin's first
novel, The Adventures of Caleb Williams, which describes
a strikingly similar sequence of events. Like Frankenstein,
Caleb Williams is driven by curiosity to discover what is the
secret of his employer, Mr. Falkland. He spies on him and is
even caught red-handed looking into a trunk, a metonymic
representation of Falkland's guilty secrets. Falkland confesses
that he is a murderer and from that point the roles of pursuer
and pursued reverse. Wherever Williams goes in England he finds
Falkland or his agents, and he seems the guilty one in
accusing Falkland of a crime he can't prove. Frankenstein is the
victim of a similar situational irony in that he can't convince
any third party that he has created a monster. In both novels
the claustrophobia grows from this realization that the struggle
can only be worked out between the two antagonists; and in both
the acceleration of the plot reflects growing panic in the one
pursued that he is helpless. The sudden appearances of the
Monster in the Alps, the Orkneys and even in Frankenstein's
bridal chamber shock him into a horrified belief that the
Monster is omnipotent. Similarly Williams realizes that nothing
he can do will put him out of Falkland's reach:

Whithersoever I removed myself, it was not long before I had
occasion to perceive this detested adversary in my rear. No
words can enable me to do justice to the sensations which this
circumstance produced in me. It was like what has been described
of the eye of Omniscience, pursuing the guilty sinner, and
darting a ray that awakens him to a new sensibility.
. . .16

The passage is expressed in a more ponderous style than in
Frankenstein but catches the mounting panic which comes
from Williams' {338} realization that his power makes Falkland a
grotesque imitation of God himself. Again like Frankenstein,
Falkland is physically depleted by the pursuit; he ages
prematurely and finally dies, whereupon Williams delivers a
glowing eulogy on him and recognizes that he has no autonomous
existence -- "no character," as he puts it. In both these
details Williams resembles the Monster and Godwin's novel as a
whole, like Mary Shelley's, mocks the ambitions of an individual
by reversing them into persecution and horror. Although there is
no explicit allusion to this novel in Frankenstein we
should remember here that it was dedicated to Godwin, and that
Mary Shelley read Caleb Williams in 1814, only two years
before she began her novel.17

The similarities between these two novels revolve partly around
the question of plot and plausibility. In his review of
FrankensteinSir Walter
Scott argued that, given the original act of creation,
everything else followed on plausibly.18 But surely this is an
oversimplification because it doesn't begin to cope with the
coincidence. How does the Monster appear in the Orkneysat the very
moment when Frankenstein is having scruples about making a
mate? How does the Monster choose to involve Justine in his
revenge although he doesn't know she is in Frankenstein's
family? And most incredible of all, how can he arrange things
in Ireland so that
Frankenstein is charged with Clerval's murder? Frankenstein
drifts there -- so can the Monster control the tides? From a
realistic point of view these coincidences seem incredibly
far-fetched. From the internal point of view of the novel's plot
they build up a grim sense of an inexorable process working
itself out, as if Frankenstein has let loose a malevolent force
which can only resolve itself through death. One of
Frankenstein's standard narrative tactics is to refer everything
-- retrospectively, of course -- to fate or destiny, which
suggests a negative inversion of his original belief that he was
destined for some great enterprise. This is such a tenacious
belief that even when he is on the verge of death he harangues
Walton's sailors on the value of glory. The contradiction
reflects Frankenstein's lack of self-knowledge since he never
really admits his responsibility, whereas at least the Monster
recognizes that his appearance is his appearance is his destiny
and accordingly transforms himself into an agent of
retribution. Frankenstein aspires to find the ultimate prin-
{339} ciple of Nature but ironically himself becomes a
first cause in initiating a stream of disasters.19

Frankenstein's original metaphor of the mountain stream implies
that there is a correspondence between the working of his mind
and of natural processes, and in a letter Elizabeth insists that
they are governed by identical laws. But then Elizabeth is
myopically satisfied with the mere appearances of Nature as is Clerval. Their
capacity for sheer irresponsible enjoyment just is not available
to Frankenstein and every time he invokes Nature this acts as a
prelude to horror.20 Wandering in the Alps near Chamounix he prematurely
experiences consolation from the tremendous scenery. He notes:
"These sublime and magnificent scenes . . . elevated
me from all littleness of feeling" (p. 96). It is an ironic pleasure
because shortly after this he will meet the Monster on the glacier.21 In fact Frankenstein underrates
the power of wild Nature which finds its equivalent in the
superhuman strength of the Monster. The mountainous and Arctic
landscapes resemble Shelley's poem "Mont Blanc" written the same
year that Mary began the novel. Shelley is dazzled by the
non-humanized mountain scene: Mont Blanc appears -- still,
snowy, and serene -- (l. 61) [the mountain becomes an embodiment
of raw, threatening energy]:

The stress all the way through the poem is on the absence of
human life and on the destructive force of Nature. This is also
the main emphasis put in the novel except for the journey down
the Rhine. But even here the
listing of details is deliberately flat because it is Clerval
not Frankenstein who responds so warmly to the scenery. He is
the Wordsworth of the
novel who experiences the beauty of nature and decides that he
could spend the rest of his life in the Lake District. Frankenstein
even quotes from "Tintern
Abbey" the lines beginning "The sounding cataract / Haunted
him like a passion," whereas the {340} only haunting
Frankenstein experiences is of quite a different kind. Nature
is simply not available to him as therapy and gradually
attenuates down to the empty dead spaces of the Arctic where he
can work out his conflict with the Monster.

The novel implies a profoundly pessimistic view of man. The
reversals and contrasts which make up its structure always work
in a negative direction. Creation suddenly reverses into
destruction, the desire to procreate into the desire to murder,
and so on. It swings from high ideals (Frankenstein's purpose)
and moral excellence (Elizabeth and Frankenstein's family
generally) to brutal vengeance and evil. There is no middle
ground between these extremes. Similarly the novel undermines
the status of Frankenstein's enterprise from the very start; any
mythic parallels further reduce the stature of the action by
showing ironically how far it is from the heroic or truly
spiritual. Neither Frankenstein nor the Monster really
understood what drives them on: we do not doubt the relish that
the Monster shows in murdering William, but, as he explains to
Walton, "I was the slave, not the master of an impulse which I
detested, yet could not disobey" (p. 220). As George Levine puts
it, "the 'psychology' of Frankenstein is essentially a
psychology without explanation."22 One contemporary reviewer sensed
that the novel works through negatives and exclaimed:

What a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity.
. . . it inculcates no lesson of conduct, manners, or
morality; it cannot mend, and will not even amuse its readers,
unless their taste have been deplorably vitiated.
. . .23

Needless to say, the conclusion does not necessarily follow from
this description. In a novel so preoccupied with fear and
destruction we would not really expect an affirmative moral.24 Of the two
notional approaches I outlined at the beginning "spectacle" fits
the narrative better, providing we recognize that the novel
depicts a purely negative spectacle which moves inexorably
towards death.

5. The various versions of the Prometheus myth
are discussed in Christopher Small's Ariel Like a Harpy
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1972), Chapter 3. It is also relevant
that Kant described Benjamin
Franklin as a "new Prometheus." Shelley had a set of
Franklin's works at Field Place and in the first edition of
Frankenstein Franklin's kite-flying experiment is
repeated.

6. This is discussed in Andrew Griffin's "Fire and Ice in
Frankenstein," in George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher,
eds., The Endurance of "Frankenstein" (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1979), pp. 49-73.

19. John R. Reed argues that aspiration or
ambition in itself sets up illusory goals which can never be
realized ("Will and Fate in Frankenstein," Bulletin of
Research in the Humanities, 83 [1980], 319-38).

24. Nevertheless in a recent historical survey
of Romantic literature Marilyn Butler states that the story
"seems clearly designed to convey a social message"
(Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries [London: Oxford
Univ. Press, 1981] p. 159). But what the social message is we
are not told.